Planning for the inevitable
Ted Byfield - Monday,17 October 2005
Western Standard
It does not require economic genius to see that big problems are arising in the economy of Ontario, which will result in big issues in the politics of Alberta. As this was written, the Ford Motor Co. had just announced the elimination of 1,100 jobs in the Windsor area over the next three years. Daimler Chrysler is planning to eliminate 450 jobs in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke and 400 more in Windsor.
These numbers do not tell anything like the whole story. Layoffs totalling in the thousands by small manufacturers have wiped out 82,000 jobs so far this year, says Statistics Canada, and 106,000 in the past 12 months. Employment in Canadian factories has dropped to a four-year low, but construction jobs, most of them in the West, have prevented the unemployment rate from rising. It stands at 6.8, a thirty-year low.
The cause of the layoffs is self-evident. The first is outsourcing, a term increasingly dreaded in the industrial world. It means shipping the job to wherever it can be done for less--either in the southern U.S., more frequently in Asia. The other is the steady rise in the Canadian dollar.
This means Paul Martin's government may face a winter election in Ontario--the part of the country that matters most to him--in an atmosphere of rising unemployment, and in a country where one province, Alberta, is enjoying the biggest boom in its history.
There's a quiet confidence among many Albertans today that Martin will not dare introduce another National Energy Program. It may be true that he won't dare call it that. But it will amount to the same thing, a theft of Alberta resource revenues on an unprecedented scale to prop up Ontario's antiquated industries.
One question should therefore be uppermost among Albertans: what can we do to stop this? We are getting no discernible leadership from the provincial government, though thankfully two of the candidates most mentioned as successors to Ralph Klein--Jim Dinning and Ted Morton--seem fully aware of the danger. They also know that a wholly negative campaign--one of outrage, threats and vague allusions to separatism--will not succeed. Outright separatism won't work--not yet, anyway.
Maybe the past has a lesson to teach us. Maybe what we need is something akin to what John Diefenbaker called "The Vision." The year was 1957, and he came like a spectral figure out of backwoods Saskatchewan, with a credible plan for the whole country. Very few people realize that at first Diefenbaker couldn't sell his vision in the West. In the famous upset election of that year, the province that bought the vision was Ontario. Diefenbaker took the Tory standing in Alberta from two seats to three, in Saskatchewan from one seat to three, in Manitoba from three seats to eight, and in Ontario from 33 seats to 61. He formed a minority government and, the next year, won the biggest election victory in Canadian history. Something else is true. In the next five years Diefenbaker made the vision work, and the chief beneficiary was the West.
Early this month, Todd Hirsch, chief economist of the Canada West Foundation, promised to come forth, nearly 50 years later, with what amounted to a restatement of Diefenbaker's vision; the foundation is creating a plan. It promises to show how Alberta's oil bonanza can be used to benefit the whole country--to harvest Manitoba's vast electric power potential, Saskatchewan's "powerhouse" uranium deposits, B.C.'s coal and offshore oil resources. It's a development plan for the whole country, based on Alberta capital. That sounds like Diefenbaker's vision, and the sooner we have it, the better, because political events may overtake it.
I think if we could somehow pit this "Alberta Plan" or "Western Plan" against the "Martin Plan" it would soon become evident that Martin hasn't got a plan, and the West does. Then if this Alberta plan is rejected everywhere east of the Manitoba-Ontario border, that will be the time to talk about separatism. We should all bear in mind that the dire option is there. For the final fact is that Alberta doesn't need either Ontario or Ottawa to make the plan work.
Ted Byfield - Monday,17 October 2005
Western Standard
It does not require economic genius to see that big problems are arising in the economy of Ontario, which will result in big issues in the politics of Alberta. As this was written, the Ford Motor Co. had just announced the elimination of 1,100 jobs in the Windsor area over the next three years. Daimler Chrysler is planning to eliminate 450 jobs in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke and 400 more in Windsor.
These numbers do not tell anything like the whole story. Layoffs totalling in the thousands by small manufacturers have wiped out 82,000 jobs so far this year, says Statistics Canada, and 106,000 in the past 12 months. Employment in Canadian factories has dropped to a four-year low, but construction jobs, most of them in the West, have prevented the unemployment rate from rising. It stands at 6.8, a thirty-year low.
The cause of the layoffs is self-evident. The first is outsourcing, a term increasingly dreaded in the industrial world. It means shipping the job to wherever it can be done for less--either in the southern U.S., more frequently in Asia. The other is the steady rise in the Canadian dollar.
This means Paul Martin's government may face a winter election in Ontario--the part of the country that matters most to him--in an atmosphere of rising unemployment, and in a country where one province, Alberta, is enjoying the biggest boom in its history.
There's a quiet confidence among many Albertans today that Martin will not dare introduce another National Energy Program. It may be true that he won't dare call it that. But it will amount to the same thing, a theft of Alberta resource revenues on an unprecedented scale to prop up Ontario's antiquated industries.
One question should therefore be uppermost among Albertans: what can we do to stop this? We are getting no discernible leadership from the provincial government, though thankfully two of the candidates most mentioned as successors to Ralph Klein--Jim Dinning and Ted Morton--seem fully aware of the danger. They also know that a wholly negative campaign--one of outrage, threats and vague allusions to separatism--will not succeed. Outright separatism won't work--not yet, anyway.
Maybe the past has a lesson to teach us. Maybe what we need is something akin to what John Diefenbaker called "The Vision." The year was 1957, and he came like a spectral figure out of backwoods Saskatchewan, with a credible plan for the whole country. Very few people realize that at first Diefenbaker couldn't sell his vision in the West. In the famous upset election of that year, the province that bought the vision was Ontario. Diefenbaker took the Tory standing in Alberta from two seats to three, in Saskatchewan from one seat to three, in Manitoba from three seats to eight, and in Ontario from 33 seats to 61. He formed a minority government and, the next year, won the biggest election victory in Canadian history. Something else is true. In the next five years Diefenbaker made the vision work, and the chief beneficiary was the West.
Early this month, Todd Hirsch, chief economist of the Canada West Foundation, promised to come forth, nearly 50 years later, with what amounted to a restatement of Diefenbaker's vision; the foundation is creating a plan. It promises to show how Alberta's oil bonanza can be used to benefit the whole country--to harvest Manitoba's vast electric power potential, Saskatchewan's "powerhouse" uranium deposits, B.C.'s coal and offshore oil resources. It's a development plan for the whole country, based on Alberta capital. That sounds like Diefenbaker's vision, and the sooner we have it, the better, because political events may overtake it.
I think if we could somehow pit this "Alberta Plan" or "Western Plan" against the "Martin Plan" it would soon become evident that Martin hasn't got a plan, and the West does. Then if this Alberta plan is rejected everywhere east of the Manitoba-Ontario border, that will be the time to talk about separatism. We should all bear in mind that the dire option is there. For the final fact is that Alberta doesn't need either Ontario or Ottawa to make the plan work.
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